Lies my mother told me All mothers lie to their children.

I was all set to write this one as a lie that my mother had told so well that I had to look it up online to double-check …only to find out that it is true! http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20080641293894

If you chew your hair you will get a hairball in your stomach like a cat.

When I was a child I used to chew my hair. It was disgusting. I used to get little crispy bits of hair round my face where it had dried after I had been sucking and chewing it. In an effort to stop me chewing my hair my mum and my granny would tell me that I would get a hair ball in my stomach like a cat (I had seen my cat cough up a hair ball and it was not at all pleasant.) As the idea of throwing up a big chunk of my own hair was not appealing, it worked and I stopped. For years I thought that they had successfully fooled me but they were right all along.

Fathers lie just as much as mothers do, albeit in a different way. This little chestnut from my dad happened on the eve of one full moon, when he decided to howl at the moon for literally about 10 minutes just to scare the shit out of me. Being a weed of a child, scared of anything even slightly supernatural (I once became terrified of this X-Files episode that I didn’t even see, but only heard from my bedroom; and The Simpsons Treehouse of Horrors’ used to scare me), I can only assume that he did this to torture me and give me another sleepless night, which seems like a far crueller lie than any my mother ever told me! This fear was made even worse by the fact that he was driving us home from my grandmother’s house that night, so the whole way home I was huddled in the backseat, waiting for the inevitable transformation that would mean the death of us all. It never happened, and I learnt to toughen up, read some Stephen King and relish the supernatural rather than cower away from it. But this does not mean my dad is forgiven for the werewolf thing, nor does it stop that little voice at the back of my mind every time there’s a full moon warning me to stay away from my dad, just in case…

I think everyone must have had some kind of experience of this one- you tell your mother something, waiting for some semblance of a response and get a “hmmmm” with just a hint of a question mark on the end of it. If you ask her if she was listening, you get a “of course I was darling”, followed by “but could you just repeat that one little bit for me?” The one little bit is just a ruse- she wasn’t really listening to any of it. Of course, if you then dare to say something about her when she is out of the room (she may even be out of the town you are in, and it won’t make any difference), in she comes to defend herself, or to make a comment on that which she has, of course, heard with perfect clarity. If confronted on this, she will automatically respond that she always listens to you, forgetting that time, almost always earlier in the day, when you were sitting next to her and she didn’t hear anything you said. I have yet to find out whether this effect is down to some kind of pavlovian response to the term ‘mum’, or if I’m just not interesting enough to listen to on any regular basis- but either way, she definitely DOES have selective hearing.

For a long long long long time I believed this one. I think I honestly thought they would change shape in my head. I wasn’t scared of it being painful (although it doesn’t sound pleasant) the thought of square eyes embarrassed me lots. It never occurred to me to ask for evidence but I really did believe that somewhere (probably in America) there was a kid with square eyes who had to wear sunglasses all the time to hide his terrible disfigurement.

HA now that I spend all my days an arm’s length away from a screen and my eyes are still eye-shaped I guess I have proved that one wrong.

Having been given a great deal of prior warning (me telling her the night before, “I’m going to Camden tomorrow and I’m going to get a piercing!”, and her replying “No you are not!”), my return with an extra hole in my right ear seemed to shock and appall her to the extent of my getting the silent treatment for a whole day (this never happens). The big deal was, apparently, the miniscule risk of getting AIDS from dirty equipment (because Camden is, seemingly, much worse for this than any other place in the entire world) and then dying. Huh.

Its been nearly 2 years now, and I still haven’t died. It’s probably just a lucky coincidence, because the death rate for this kind of thing must be up around 90%. Some real life equivalent of the Final Destination films follows me around every day I’m still alive… 

My mother is not a morning person. That is the biggest understatement ever, my mother cannot be extricated from her bed in the morning with less than a cup of tea and probably some toast. I should say here that I am not a morning person at all, right now its 2.13 AM and I’m writing this rather than sleeping. But lets get back to the lie.

My mother would often claim to be getting up: “are you awake mum? We are supposed to be leaving in half an hour”

“I’m awake!” she would reply. Often she would just call it out if she could sense we were wondering if she was conscious.

And here comes the lie my mother told me. Often after she had told us she was awake she would roll over and sleep. She has been known to mumble “I’m awake” in her sleep. Quite often she would be clutching the cup of tea that Dad had brought her in the hopes that it would coax her from that cosy nest, the tea spilling slightly as her hand drooped.